For John Carter, Director Andrew Stanton Leaps From Animation to Live-Action Sci-Fi

An intricate array of stand-ins, natural backdrops, live performers, and CG effects comes together in a shot from Disney's John Carter.
Photo: Frank Connor

There are parts of our planet so stark, so bizarre in their topography, that it’s easy to imagine they’re alien landscapes. Today Andrew Stanton is determined to exploit the unearthly vibes of just such a place. The film director is on location in Big Water, Utah, in a vast dusty wasteland surrounded by ancient-looking rust-colored cliffs. His only defenses against the harsh environment are a red baseball cap—which adds to the 44-year-old’s boyishness—and a surgical-style mask to keep the dust out of his lungs.

He may be on Earth, but for Stanton the experience is as otherworldly as if he had actually donned a space suit, climbed into a rocket, and blasted off to destinations unknown. He never had to leave the comfy cubicles of Pixar Animation Studios to have a hand in writing and directing the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo or WALL-E—or to spearhead the screenplays for Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, or the first two Toy Story films. There were no sets to build, no locations to scout, no actors to position.

But now, on a gusty afternoon in May 2010, on the outdoor set of his forthcoming $250 million Disney epic, John Carter, he’s facing shooting delays due to unpredictable winds. The crew and the actors are stuck waiting. So it’s only natural that he train a lens on his most recent career move. “I couldn’t have made a more difficult transition,” he says matter-of-factly.

Stanton’s production-design team chose this high-desert spot to represent a barren stretch of the planet Barsoom—which, as readers of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original John Carter pulp novels know, is what Martians call Mars. Barsoom may not be as well known as Tatooine or Pandora (which both owe a healthy debt to the planet), but for Stanton and other Carter devotees, it’s the Planet Zero of space fantasy. “I’ve been a fan of the books my whole life,” Stanton says, “hoping to see somebody make a movie of them. If we do it right, hopefully it will kick off a series.”

Of course, that’s if this first installment works out. John Carter is a huge Lord of the Rings-style marathon mashup of CGI and live action, and at times like this, day 73 of a 100-odd-day shoot, it’s also a logistical slog. The movie’s leading man, Taylor Kitsch (best known as brooding high school football hero Tim Riggins on TV’s Friday Night Lights), has been on call playing Carter nearly every one of those days and will eventually be exhausted to the point where he catnaps on set between takes. And this is just the warm-up to another year and a half of CG animation and visual effects, which Stanton calls digital principal photography. Essentially he’s making a live-action movie, then making an equally involved animated movie after that. The parlor trick is to marry them, to make what’s virtual look as realistic as what’s not. “I want that visceral feel I had when I watched the first 20 minutes of Star Wars,” Stanton says.

Stanton ran his human cast through a grueling 100-day live shoot that combined exterior locations with sounds stages like this one in London.
Photo: Frank Connor

But in his quest for verisimilitude, Stanton has to cope with real-world conditions—and right now they’re kicking his ass. Consider the director’s efforts to stage a scene of Carter talking with Tars Tarkas, a 10-foot Barsoomian leader played by Willem Dafoe—or rather, Willem Dafoe on stilts and wearing a motion-capture getup. The stilts let the camera operators correctly frame the shot in which the CG Tarkas will eventually go, and it gives Kitsch the right spot to look at. Now that the breezes have turned into honest-to-goodness gusts, the set is as compromised as Dafoe’s balance: Fusillades of grainy, sooty gray sand are flying through the air, getting into ears and noses and under fingernails. It stings so much it’s impossible to work. Stanton decides to shut down until the weather abates.

For the better part of an afternoon, the production hovers in standby mode—a nerve-jangling place to be. Through it all, Stanton remains upbeat. He never retreats to a trailer. He rarely sits. When the wind finally dies down and shooting prep resumes, the crew scrambles to make up for lost time. That’s when someone upstages the proceedings by pumping Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s “Against the Wind” out of the set’s PA system.

It works like a well-timed punch line: The crew appreciates the joke, even if Stanton himself is no fan of the tune. The schedule gets back into reasonably good shape by the evening, and in the end the initial live-action shoot will come in exactly on schedule for the movie to hit screens March 9. For now Stanton stands one day closer to his goal: adapting a book series that so many before him have tried and failed to bring to the big screen. It would appear that he’s doing it. But is he doing it well? Can it meet the dauntingly high standards of his Pixar films? He’s not sure he can answer those questions right now. “I’ve always wondered,” he says, “how the hell you make a live-action movie and have it be good.”

As brain candy for very smart people, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels went viral a long time ago. Not today’s kind of viral—it wasn’t instantaneous. But their influence has been unstoppable and lasting. They began appearing in 1912, initially in periodicals like All-Story Magazine, as serialized chapters about a Civil War veteran and prospector named John Carter who finds a portal to Mars in an old cave. There would ultimately be 10 full-length novels (and a posthumously assembled 11th volume) of planetary romance, a bizarre amalgam of medieval and futuristic elements full of swordplay and arena fights.

Overwrought as they could be, they captured people’s imaginations. “He reached a huge pulp-magazine audience,” Burroughs biographer Richard Lupoff says. “And among that audience was most of the next generation of science fiction writers. These were the people who would dominate Astounding Stories of Super-Science and Science Wonder Stories 20 years later.” Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury claimed Burroughs as his chief creative totem, and Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, among others) was also a fan. Carl Sagan once confessed to wanting a vanity license plate that read barsoom.

The Martian Chronicles

The journey from pulp serial to big screen has taken longer than a real trip to the Red Planet. A brief history of John Carter.

Click the arrows to move through the timeline.

As source material for movies, however, the stories were a resounding failure. In the pre-digital-effects era, filmmakers simply didn’t have the tools to translate Burroughs’ visions. Still, there were periodic bursts of interest. After Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind took off in 1977, Hollywood’s appetite for sci-fi exploded, and in the mid-’80s Disney set up a live-action John Carter movie. It was to star Tom Cruise, but director John McTiernan (Die Hard) never found an affordable way to realize the effects. Then after the ballyhooed inception of Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, Paramount Pictures bought the rights—but over the next five years, version after version fell apart, with Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), Kerry Conran (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and Jon Favreau (Iron Man) all striking out for various reasons. “It got to be known in Hollywood as the curse of John Carter,” says Jim Sullos, president of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., the company the author formed in 1923 to facilitate the publishing, licensing, and merchandising of his work. “Nobody could figure out how to make this movie.”

Then in early 2007, with Stanton keenly interested, Disney reacquired the rights and agreed to commission him to develop a script for John Carter based on Burroughs’ first novel, A Princess of Mars. Stanton’s pitch went like this: The movie will be half CGI, half live action, so you’d be taking only a 50-50 shot on a first-time live-action filmmaker. The studio thought the risk was worthwhile—but Disney may also have been playing a larger tactical game. By saying yes to a very expensive movie, it kept Stanton from leaving the Disney-Pixar fold to set up a live-action deal with some other studio, as his fellow Pixar alum Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) did with Paramount for last December’s Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol. Now Disney just hopes that “lifting the curse” means rivaling MI4‘s $95 million gross in its first 10 days of wide release (a respectable, if modest, success roughly comparable to the first day’s take of last summer’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2).

In his years at Pixar, Stanton has demonstrated a lot of raw filmmaking talent. But nothing impresses colleagues more than his ability to diagram a good story that’s working and vivisect a bad one that’s not. Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter hired Stanton as an animator in 1990, when the company was just beginning to make TV commercials. Feature films were a distant goal, but Stanton was soon specializing in story lines and plotting. It’s what Lasseter calls his “sense of what’s missing” that has made Stanton such a valued member of the brain trust—Pixar’s group of creatives who screen upcoming projects in various stages and offer input.

Whatever the project, Stanton is usually one of the first to start the critical ball rolling. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, who codirected Nemo with Stanton, says, “I need time to digest and think about why things aren’t working. Andrew is ready to go instantly. The moment we finish a screening, he has a laundry list of big-picture issues that are broken or out of alignment with the story. It’s amazing to me. It’s a savant kind of quality.”

Still, when faced with the behemoth that was John Carter, Stanton and his team found themselves struggling to get a handle on it. “How do you make this idea fresh when there are many, many films that have derived from the source material over the years?” producer Jim Morris says. With so many Burroughs conceits informing so many later sci-fi touchstones—the stranger in a strange land, the advanced but antagonistic alien species, the winning of trust and redemption of purpose—Stanton knew that surly fanboys would be more than ready to razz any Carter movie as a rip-off.

Stanton also had never done an adaptation before, only original stories—and as screenwriters know, the Bob Vila theorem clearly states that renovating a rickety property can be tougher than building from the ground up. He asked Disney to get the rights to Burroughs’ first three Mars books as a package, to develop them as a potential trilogy. Though there’d be no up-front commitment to a second or third movie, all three would have to be outlined at the same time anyway so the script for film one didn’t paint them into a storytelling corner.

Since John Carter wouldn’t be a Pixar film, Stanton lost the help of its story department—a dedicated group with a seemingly limitless reserve of gags, dialog, and situational ideas. He was slammed for time too: When he took on John Carter, he was still only halfway through making WALL-E. “I needed somebody to keep stirring the pot on the stove while I was busy cooking other things,” Stanton says.

His first collaborator was Pixar’s Mark Andrews (currently codirecting the Pixar 2012 summer release, Brave), a fellow Carter enthusiast. The two started out with a list of pet peeves about Burroughs’ books. Peeve one: They’re terribly episodic, partly because they were written as serial chapters that each demanded its own cliff-hanger. But a bigger issue was that the protagonist was a little boring. Says Andrews, “John Carter was complete from the first page. There was nothing to learn about him.” As a fix, Stanton and Andrews came up with a haunted-veteran angle: Carter had lost his wife and child during the war, and in meeting princess Dejah Thoris on Mars, he rediscovers a purpose to his imploded life. “It’s now a hero origin story,” Andrews says.

Stanton and his crew used a combination of stilts and motion-capture suits to create CG crowds of 10-foot-tall Tharks.
Photo: Frank Connor

By chance, novelist Michael Chabon heard about the ongoing John Carter script at Brad Bird’s Christmas party in 2008. Stanton then learned through the grapevine that Chabon wanted in, and he couldn’t believe his luck. “I called him up,” Stanton remembers, “and he said yes before I could get off the phone.” Stanton now had his own rump story department. In various combinations, the three writers bounced versions off one another throughout 2009, racing to give the narrative as many iterations as possible before filming started in January 2010. That marked the date that Stanton would be locked in—unlike animated sequences, live action can’t easily be ripped up and reworked wholesale, something that typically happens four times over the four-year production cycle of a Pixar movie. “We had only so much time to find all the problems,” Stanton says. “I knew there were at least two dozen sharks swimming under the surface. How could we get them to rise up, and nail them?”

Stanton never did find all the sharks. He plunged into live-action shooting in January 2010 and wrapped up in July. By January 2011, with digital animation in full swing, he got a very rough cut ready to show the Pixar brain trust, which these days also weighs in on Disney animation and live-action projects. The screening was less than triumphant. His Princess Thoris, played by Lynn Collins (in X-Men Origins: Wolverine she died photogenically in the arms of Hugh Jackman), simply wasn’t very likable. She kept punching Carter—something that was ultimately cut from the movie. And an opening sequence meant to explain the complicated, strife-torn Martian history played badly, baffling viewers with a torrent of strange Barsoomian names and terms.

To address these issues, Stanton did two rounds of additional shooting in April and August 2011. He had until mid-October to “lock picture,” at which point no further changes in the length or order of shots could happen. He was still running against the wind.

It’s late October 2011 and Stanton is pushing to complete the digital portion of the movie by early December. The sound mix will finish by January, at which point he’ll launch immediately into promotional travel that will take him right through the film’s March opening.

His production offices in Emeryville, California, are a block away from the main Pixar campus, which makes it easy for Stanton to wear his Pixar hat between Carter duties. A dry-erase board on the wall reveals the hard stats: The movie has a mind-bending 2,295 visual-effects shots—more than in an entire Pixar computer-animated feature—and only about 1,600 of them have been approved, or “finaled,” by Stanton. That leaves more than 530 to green-light in the next six weeks.

This morning it’s time to review the latest batch. This involves Stanton watching footage on a giant projection screen and using a Wacom tablet to sketch fixes, then relaying them via squawk box to staffers at three different London f/x houses—specialists in blending computer-animated characters and structures into live-action backgrounds. Thankfully, John Carter‘s digital production coincided with an unexpected windfall: A crop of animators had just finished working on Avatar and relocated to London. (Working with UK teams also gives Disney a big tax advantage.)

Over the past two years, roughly 1,500 digital artists have worked on a staggering array of imagery that constitutes the world of Barsoom. They’ve created the teeming cityscapes and airborne warships of two competing cultures, the peace-loving Heliumites and the aggressive, resource-pillaging Zodangans; thousands of Barsoomians, including the bloodthirsty Warhoons and the nomadic Tharks, who lumber along on eight-legged horselike creatures called thoats; massive, six-limbed white apes, which are kept by the Tharks for gladiatorial arena games; a movable city-state built by the Zodangans that churns up the Martian landscape like a roving coal-mining operation; and a lovable character named Woola—a doglike “calot” with 10 stout legs that scampers at breakneck speed in the low gravity of Mars and looks like the love child of Jabba the Hutt and an English bulldog. Making the animated movement convincing is only part of the task for realizing each of these digital creations. The more important trick is to make the audience believe they’re all part of the photographed landscape.

Stanton and his crew used a combination of stilts and motion-capture suits to create CG crowds of 10-foot-tall Tharks.
Photo: Frank Connor

“Why do I get so tired when I come in here?” Stanton says, sitting down on a couch directly in front of the projection screen. “Is this the new dust dispersal?” he asks of a shot involving a giant, burst-open gateway. “It doesn’t feel finished.” Lots of rustling and “mmm-hmms” on the London end. Another shot comes up, this one of a knife plunging into an ankle. “Can you guys step-frame a second? … OK, here’s the problem.” More red scribbles on the pad. “That knife keeps wobbling around after it stabs the leg. We’ve got to cheat this better.” Tarkas appears in the next shot, standing next to a saddled thoat. Stanton quickly circles the saddle. “Was Tars always celebrating breast-cancer awareness day with that pink ribbon around his saddle?”

The details that need tiny but crucial adjustments keep piling up. After the session, he compliments the Londoners’ work but is unblinking about the difficulty of the process. “Effects houses aren’t used to treating animation like it’s production,” he says. “They think, ‘We show you a shot, you give us a couple of notes, we do those notes, and then we’re done.’ If it were that easy, we’d all be making movies cheaper and faster. You have to be willing to go back to square one if you want to make the movie right.”

It’s striking to see what a solitary pursuit this phase of John Carter is for Stanton. Aside from his editor, producers, and a few assistants coming in and out of the screening room, a lot of the work has been little more than him talking to disembodied voices in the dark, week after week, month after month—even though he regularly visited the London teams for face-to-face sessions. His producer, Lindsey Collins, who worked with Stanton on WALL-E, calls it “a much lonelier experience” than the usual Pixar collaboration. “Creatively he’s by himself.”

Until John Carter opens in March, Andrew Stanton won’t know what his next project will be—but whatever it is, it’s already well planned. In his office, along with a bookshelf full of the how-to guides he used to teach himself screenwriting, there are two enormous black bulletin boards covered with neatly arranged, color-coded index cards held in place with pins. One board is a giant working status report on what appears to be dozens of script ideas. “This is everything I’ve planned that’s in my brain, for life,” he says. “All in code.” The projects are identified with mysterious acronyms, which makes it impossible to suss out what they are—but one entire column is headed “TV.”

On a second board, Stanton has mapped out the entire three-act structure of Gods of Mars, the potential second entry in the Carter series. Won’t he feel like doing all that work was a waste of time or a disappointment if John Carter fails to become a franchise—which, given its huge budget, is entirely possible, even if the movie is a critical and popular success?

Stanton looks truly puzzled that anyone would think of it that way. “I never find it a waste of time to be researching and writing,” he says. “At worst it’s practice for writing something else.” He mentions that a New Yorker profile last year suggested he was disappointed that Disney didn’t commit up front to additional Carter movies after an initial test screening went well. That, he says, is not accurate. The only reason he’s prepping assiduously for the remaining parts of the trilogy is that he doesn’t want to be caught with his “pants down,” as he puts it, if there’s a demand for more installments. Waiting until the first movie opens would mean that “we’re gonna be too late.”

So which path is Stanton most hoping for, more John Carter or more Pixar movies? “One of the things that’s been really helpful to me on this whole journey is that it’s not my day job,” he says of the would-be epic. “My day job is Pixar, and it always will be.” He continues to advise on Pixar films. (Brad Bird does too.) But that still doesn’t explain why Stanton decided to try his hand at live action. “The natural assumption is that there are career choices being made here,” he says, “and that’s flawed thinking. I’ve never made a career choice. I’ve never had the hubris to think I could. I just make movies I personally want to see.”

Now it’s time to find out if the public shares his appetite. The winds of box-office fate are swirling. Cue Bob Seger. And … fade in.

Steve Daly (sdalynyc@gmail.com) is coauthor of Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film. He wrote about J.J. Abrams’ creature designer in issue 17.05.